Theodorus Johannes Schoon

Theodorus Johannes "Theo" Schoon (31 July 1915 – 14 July 1985) was an artist, photographer and carver in New Zealand of Dutch parentage.

Theo Schoon was born at Kebumen, Java in the East Indies, the son of Dutch parents, Johannes Theodorus Schoon and his wife Barbara Isabella Maria Steegemans. Theo lived in Java with his parents and brother before being sent to the Netherlands for his education. He attended the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and also travelled widely in Europe. In 1936 he returned to Java and set up an art studio. In 1939, with the war looming, he and his parents emigrated to New Zealand.

While his art school training was conservative, Schoon knew about the Bauhaus, a German art and design school that revolutionised twentieth-century art. The Bauhaus taught that divisions between art and craft were illusory, and both were equally valid artistic expressions. This idea influenced Schoon for his whole artistic life and gave him the freedom to experiment in many media including drawing, printmaking, painting, wood carving, potting, stone carving, jewellery-making and photography.

While Schoon was mostly unimpressed with the local art scene in New Zealand he did briefly attend the Canterbury University College School of Art before moving to Wellington in 1941. While in Wellington he came in contact with artists whose work he approved of and influenced including Rita Angus – for whom he was one of the main sources of her interest in Buddhist art and culture;Gordon Walters – with whom he shared his interest in non-figurative painting; Dennis Knight Turner; and A. R. D. Fairburn. His portrait was painted by Rita Angus.

Schoon was very interested in Maori art. From the mid-1940s He studied the early Maori rock drawings in Canterbury caves and was employed by the Department of Internal Affairs to record the drawings from 1945 to 1948. On several of his trips to these caves he was accompanied by friend John Money, who was later to become a major patron of both Schoon and Angus.

He moved to Auckland in 1949 and stayed with A. R. D. Fairburn before moving on to Rotorua in 1950 where he began a series of photographic studies of mudpools and silica formations around Rotorua and Taupo. He returned to Auckland in 1952 and shifted his artistic focus to Maori designs in Moko (facial tattooing), carved gourds, and kowhaiwhai (rafters of meeting houses). He began to grow and carve his own gourds in 1956–57. He moved to the East Coast in 1961 to study traditional carving techniques with the Maori carver Pine Taiapa and was encouraged to publish an article on growing gourds in the Maori magazine Te Ao Hou in 1962 to accompany an article on carved gourds. In 1963 his gourds were the only artwork by a Pakeha (non-Maori) featured in an exhibition of Maori art held at Turangawaewae marae, Ngaruawahia. Most of Schoon's gourds were sold to tourists and only a few remain in New Zealand today.

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